Venerable Nano Nagle (Honora Nagle)

Life

Honora 'Nano' Nagle was born around 1718 at Ballygriffin, on the river Blackwater in County Cork, into a wealthy Catholic landed family that had clung to its faith through the Cromwellian confiscations and the Williamite wars. Because the Penal Laws forbade Catholic education in Ireland, her parents sent her to be schooled in France, where she lived a fashionable Parisian life as a young woman.

The turning point came one early morning when, returning home from a society ball, she saw a group of poor women waiting outside a church for the first Mass of the day. The contrast of their patient faith with her own emptiness shook her. She entered a convent in France with the intention of becoming a contemplative, but a Jesuit confessor convinced her that her real vocation lay back in Ireland, among the poor she had left behind.

Returning secretly to Cork in 1749, she opened her first school in a rented cabin in Cove Lane, teaching small groups of girls in defiance of the Penal Laws, which still made the Catholic instruction of children a transportable offence. The school grew with astonishing speed; within nine months over two hundred children were in her care, and by the 1770s she was running seven schools across Cork city.

By day she taught; at night, lantern in hand, she walked the lanes of Cork visiting the sick, the dying, prisoners and prostitutes, earning the affectionate nickname 'the Lady with the Lantern'. To secure her work after her death, on Christmas Eve 1775 she founded a religious community, the Society of Charitable Instruction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which on 24 June 1776 received the habit. Reorganised in 1791 as the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it became the first native Irish congregation of religious women in over a thousand years.

Worn out by her labours and by the tuberculosis she had contracted from her night-time work among the sick, she died at her convent in Cove Lane on 26 April 1784, aged 65. The Presentation Sisters now serve in over twenty countries. She was declared Venerable by Pope Francis on 31 October 2013.